Beauty, Mercy, Justice

Apophatia VI: Early November

Halloween was cold and rainy, like most of late October. The winds blew hard and the morning suddenly looked and felt like November, the coldest day so far, the leaves stripped early from most of the trees. A leaden sky bore down on the world all day. I love all weather, except the most extreme temperatures, but I must admit that November is my least favorite month. In Michigan, where I grew up, the sun was a rarity, the sky grey and brooding.

But I must say that the discovery, in the last few years, of Sierra Nevada’s seasonal Celebration Ale has given me something to look forward to with the arrival of the eleventh month. It is an IPA made with freshly harvested, not dried hops, and it is delicious. I just drank my first six pack. Check it out if you are unfamiliar with it: After the Synod

Let me get this straight. You can be a weapons manufacturer and no one is going to ask you to refrain from receiving communion in a Catholic parish. You can found a corporation of mercenaries and you will be invited to speak at the Acton Institute. And you can receive communion. You can be a multimillionaire politician and take up with an aging Catholic choir girl. get your two previous unions, which you destroyed by your infidelity, annulled and marry your new honey in the Church, no problem. Bishops will attend your reception. If you are a politician who wars against labor and the poor by his votes you can receive. Or one who zealously promotes abortion, a tragic and violent solution to a crisis. Or you can be a businessman who pays his workers poverty wages while living in luxury. And of course if you are a couple who are not obeying church teaching regarding birth control you are not going to be interrogated in the communion line. If you are a former head of the CIA under GW Bush, who has not only overseen a policy of torturing captives but has defended said policy in the Wall Street Journal you not only can receive communion but you will be asked to give the commencement address at a prominent Catholic university, one which touts its Catholicity. And they will give you an honorary doctorate.

So what again is the problem with not asking questions of same sex companions and those in complicated families, of assuming good will of everyone in charity?

Me, I don’t think anyone over the age of seven should ever receive communion. The rest of us are too messy. The Romans communicate everyone who meets the canonical standard but not the most worthy of all, babies and small children.

Rumors of Schism?

It is getting weird, folks, with bishops and cardinals openly criticizing Francis and well-respected commentators like Ross Douthat suggesting that the time is nigh for conservative Catholics to take on the pope, if not to bolt altogether. They frequently use St Paul’s rebuke of St Peter as a precedent, though that is a strange choice: Peter was rebuked for not being openly supportive of extending a welcome to those who did not observe Jewish law, while Francis is criticized for extending a welcome to those who are in canonically problematic situations. On the plus side, it is nice to see conservative Catholics getting beyond the superpapalism that long marked that corner of the Church, a tendency only too familiar to me.

But to traditionalists who value theological and liturgical constructs that, however beautiful, are mostly human, this pope has opened the door to the opposite, and very protestant error. This is going to be interesting, and could mark the birth pangs of the era of Vatican II, which has only begun.

Apophatic Bumper Stickers, Inc.

I am going produce a line of apophatic bumper stickers. I do not fool myself into thinking that this is going to make a lot of money, but here are a few:

But all the examples you give – the weapons manufacturer, the mercenary chief, the abortion advocate – all argue for greater restrictions on communion, not fewer. Surely you are not insisting that those individuals are correctly receiving communion?

Of course, not just couples “who are not obeying church teaching regarding birth control” are spared interrogation in the communion line. I’ve certainly never seen it. I read about a few rainbow sash wearers being refused (exactly once) but their speech, in that context, was as clear as Sinead O’Conner’s and got them exactly what they wanted.

I will agree with you this far – incomplete understanding of marriage (as well as the other subjects you reference) is the norm. This is the lamentable result of Church teaching unsupported by society, and demonstrates the need for more effective engagement between them. It also supports the use of more annulments.

Our economic system creates similarly poor understandings – and similar needs for increased charity. In that arena, however, you rightly call for greater institutional rigor and lament the accomodations made for the sake of comfort. Similar accomodations to marriage are equally unlikely to harmonize society to the Church.

Yeah, Ross, it is a dilemma, no? I tend to think that to err on the side of generosity and mercy is wise. Same with marriage: one of the things that worries me about the current annulment praxis is the prospects of a sort of gnostic cult in the church of the ‘canonically married’, of those few deemed psychologically integrated and sexually mature and spiritually wise enough to actually be able to achieve a valid marriage.

Or who can afford the price of the annulment.

I say give communion to everyone who approaches, especially the babies. Give it to the nice old ladies who live together and the homeless man and the hooker and the flamboyant black drag queen. Which I have actually seen in DC 25 years ago at the Latin Mass at St Mary’s downtown, the one where I worshipped with Justice Scalia and Pat Buchanan and tons of Christendom alumni. The one with the anti-Jewish conspiracy literature on the table during coffee hour.